


Homecoming

by shinychimera, Yeomanrand



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Family, Gen, Hanukkah, Homecoming, Mother-Son Relationship, POV Female Character, POV Third Person, Present Tense, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-09
Updated: 2013-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-24 08:20:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/632370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinychimera/pseuds/shinychimera, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of her five-year mission, at the end of Earth's year, at the end of the sacrifices that have scattered and embittered her family, Winona Kirk returns to a long-empty Iowa farmhouse for a lonely holiday — and learns anew that the end of one thing is the beginning of another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [igrockspock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/gifts).



Winona rounds the corner into the long farmhouse driveway, cursing the snow. Heavier than predicted; a white wall between her and the house and only the sensors on the rental car keep her from running into the garage door.

She's tired, and tense, and irritated with herself for feeling homesick when she's just finished a very long journey to the place that's supposed to be "home". Tired, because the end of the _Yorktown_ 's five-year mission had fallen so close to the end-of-the-Earth-year holidays that she and the rest of the engineering crew had worked around the chronometer to coax a little extra speed from the battered engines, and get people back to their families in time. Tense, because as soon as brass was clear they were going to make it home for Christmas and Kwanzaa and Hanukkah and Solstice, everyone else had lit up the subspace channels to let their loved ones know. And she had not.

Winona picks up her scarf from the seat, slowly wraps it back around her neck, staring out into the swirling snow. She'd dithered and delayed about returning to Riverside, calling her sons; she'd volunteered for all the scutwork of bringing the starship into dock and putting her into hibernation to let others beam down earlier. More than two decades since his death, and it still makes her sad to celebrate anything without George. She knows Sam is still at college on Deneva and won't be able to fly back any earlier than planned for the _Yorktown_ 's scheduled homecoming; and he'll want to celebrate the festival with his new wife anyway. And Jim — the sweet pre-teen who has become so aimless, angry and reckless since she left him behind — Jim doesn't answer her calls at all, these days.

She deliberately tries not to think about Jim out somewhere in this wintry mess on his damned bike, contemptuous of the dangers, and the holidays, and her concern.

Ultimately, spending the waning days of the year in an echoing starship, no matter how well-loved, will be more depressing than returning to the farmhouse that's stood mostly empty since she and Sam have been gone. She'll take the opportunity to air and clean the place, make it feel less abandoned if and when the boys do come to see her.

She pushes the car door open wearily and steps out into snow that catches in her hair and eyelashes. She's surrounded by the peculiar quiet that comes with a snowstorm, and she pauses despite herself; the crystallized moisture of alien worlds has never spoken to her childhood self the way this snow does, wrapping her in cold that feels ineffably _right_. She closes her eyes and tips her face up to the sky, mouth open to catch the crisp wet flakes.

But only for a moment — she's too lonely without someone laughing at or with her moment of childish joy. She follows the line of the garage to the side door of the house, slips into the mudroom to drop her outerwear on the washer and stomp the snow off her regulation boots before reaching down to take them off.

The tile floor is cold under her stocking feet, and the room dark. The deep breath she takes carries musty air with the faintest hint of old cinnamon.

Winona pushes open the door to the house proper, and stops in the back hallway, mouth half open. The house is _warm_ , and filled with scents, not just cinnamon but cloves and nutmeg, roasting meat and fried potatoes. She pads toward the light spilling softly from the kitchen at the end of the hall, ears picking up indistinct music as she goes.

She'd expected darkness and cobwebs, slipcovers and bittersweet memories, a chill night of the soul in more ways than one. And instead the place feels lived-in, special; redolent with cooking odors, and candle wax, and pine in the fireplace.

She smiles at the fleeting memory of the first time Jim and Sam had tried to put on the fire for her, before either of them had known how to operate the flue. She'd thought they were never going to get the smell of smoke out of the house, and her boys had been all blue-eyed innocence. And for heartbeats she wonders if her childhood belief in fairies and helpful brownies has come to life; an unexpected kindness in reward for her insistence on setting out milk in a bowl every night from age four to ten.

But a familiar tenor sings faintly off-key in the kitchen, filling her chest to overflowing. She stops at the kitchen threshold and leans quietly against the archway.

It's Jim standing next to the open oven, of course it is, singing completely inappropriate lyrics to the tune of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" and carefully spooning juices over the crackling skin of a steaming goose. The kitchen is burnished clean, and the family photos have been rehung in their old places on the wall, over the humble butcher-block table where the boys had done all their homework. It's here — rather than on the nicer table in the dining room — where he's laid place settings for two with her wedding china, brought up from the basement. And in the window, seven unlit candles flank the bright _shamash_ burning in the center of his great-grandmother's menorah.

She stares in wonder, shaking her head; Jim hangs out in the bars around the Starfleet shipyard, of course he would have heard her ship was back, but she hadn't expected....

Her eyes ache, reading a thousand unspoken meanings into the hours of preparation on display. Her aimless, reckless Jim, who wants all these family treasures and traditions around him; who _wants_ to celebrate with her, after all the wounds gotten and given.

Not forgotten, but maybe forgiven.

With quick and expert fingers — and she has no idea when he learned to cook, or from whom — he crimps the protective foil more tightly around the wings and legs of the goose without getting burned, and he looks so solid and sure of himself, so much like his father. Her restless young genius has grown up since she last saw him, and though she thought she'd come to terms with the hard decision to go back into space, and the sacrifices it required, she feels a lump of regret in her throat, because she doesn't know for herself what kind of man Jim has become.

The soft glow of the _shamash_ candle in the menorah says one thing about him. The bawdy song and the exasperated stories she's heard from the Riverside Shipyard doc says another. And the shadow of a bruise on his cheek and the ginger way he carries himself tell her that his brashness and rebellious instincts haven't yet been tempered. She sighs to herself. Still fighting his way through life.

 _But not tonight_ , she resolves, _not with me_.

She waits until the bird is tucked safely back in the oven before she draws his attention.

"Jim," she says, her voice as soft and thick with emotion as the first time she'd called him by his name, the momentous, unspeakable day he was born.

He startles, but hides anything else he might be feeling behind a broad grin. "Mom!"

She comes over to wrap her arms around Jim, because the things he's trying to say with _latkes_ and lights are too big for her, too. His arms tighten around her in return, and for the first time since George died Winona feels ever so quietly embraced by _home_.

**Author's Note:**

> A much shorter, commentboxed version was posted to igrockspock's fandom stocking.


End file.
